Increasing your impact in your community through marketing

market research

As I examined in a previous post, Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter thinks that profit is the key to scale, even for nonprofit organizations. Lack of profit might be what keeps social enterprises from reaching the scale necessary to make a difference in the world.

Marketers often benchmark their goods and services against the competition. For countries, the main benchmark for nearly a century has been Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. The United States rules in GDP. While increasing GDP does correlate with some improvement in social conditions, it is purely an economic measure. As the measure of a country, a society, it’s narrow and incomplete. The Social Progress Index goes beyond gross domestic product to measure what makes a country great for its citizens: meeting basic needs, providing for wellbeing, and offering opportunity.

Regardless of whether you support same-sex marriage or not, have you wondered how the movement went from losing 30 state-wide votes by 2009 to winning approval in 37 states and a Supreme court ruling by 2015? It really was a stunning comeback victory for marketing same-sex marriage.

Data goes a long way towards informing the design process. It can pinpoint who your audience is, where they are, what they need, how they want it delivered, and how they want to pay for it.

Quality data can be difficult for public and social sector organizations to generate on their own, and expensive to purchase. Check out these sources of free, high quality social research data. (Use free visualization tools to explore and present your relevant data.)

In his 2016 State of the Union address, President Obama announced a “moon shot” project to find a cure for cancer. A recent Marketplace story explained that a big focus of this project is to make more data available to researchers.

You’re probably not a cancer researcher, but many public and social sector organizations focus on health and could use more data for market research. Here are several sources for free medical data to help you in your projects:

For core marketing activities such as design, pricing, promotion and distribution, data helps. Data tells you what do make, for whom, how much to charge, and where your audience can be found.

But data can be expensive to buy and even more expensive, in both time and money, to generate on your own. As a social and public sector marketer, you likely don’t have that time and money, or maybe even the tools and skills for generating data sets.

Marketers are big consumers, and lovers, of IT and data, crunching numbers to find new trends, new markets, and new ways to serve their customers. Government program designers should be no different. One recent case in point is the state of Indiana and infant mortality.

Public-sector marketers often work with mountains of data, large expectations, and thin budgets. How to make sense of all that data without hiring expert researchers, buying expensive software, or burning hours trying to make Microsoft Excel answer what seems like a simple question?